Impunity

Kurt Waldheim, former Austrian president and UN Secretary-General, died yesterday.

In the Balkans, he will be remembered primarily as a Nazi officer involved in atrocities against Serbs and Jews in western Bosnia.

Robert Fisk has an interesting and informative obituary detailing Waldheim's "career" in the Belfast Telegraph and the Independent.

So here's a war criminal who not only "escaped justice" but eventually rose to the highest office of the UN, the very organization which later (overstepping its already generously broad mandate) established the illegal "tribunal" for political persecution of Balkans leaders (and some more than others). And no, that's not a typo.

Having covered up the genocide the Nazis and their allies conducted in Yugoslavia during World War Two, the Empire - which, after all, has those very same allies today - fabricated a "genocide" supposedly committed by the Serbs, and has used the "tribunal" as a tool of political pressure to ensure Serb submission. For years we've been hearing about "war criminals eluding justice" and "ending the culture of impunity." The hypocrisy is astounding.